Philippians 2: Grace and Relationships | Guest Speaker: Scotty Smith

Thank you, Russ.

It's great to be with you and your awesome wife and your sister.

I mean your mom that I met today.

Such a joy to meet Mary.

But uh it is an honor to be with you.

And I always count it a privilege when I am assigned a topic.

Because usually when I go and preach and teach somewhere when there is a particular theme given to me, I know it's not just for your benefit, it's because the Spirit wants to stir something afresh in my own heart.

And so the topic that Russ gave me, really, that we considered yesterday in the context of marriage, and will now consider today in terms of all of our relationships.

The theme is grace and relationships.

What are the implications of God's grace for the fact that we are highly relational people?

I didn't say greatly healthy relational people, but to do life is to do relationships.

The God who made us made us for rich intimacy, robust, fulfilling relationship with himself, and then to live in that glorious wonder of what it means to have him as a father, to have that relationship permeate all of our relationships, whether it's marriage or parenting or relating to our aging parents, whether it's being friends or neighbors or coworkers.

And so the text that we're going to walk through today, I consider to be just really one of the most seminal core passages that should become homeroom for us.

If you want one passage of many that would do a profound and helpful job of summarizing for us how God's grace comes to us that it might flow through us, this passage.

Now, you read, I think in your bulletin, is that the ESV translation?

Okay, which is awesome.

I'm going to be actually confusing a few of you because I'm going to be preaching from my Bible of about 45 years, which is the old NIV, the original NIV, the New International Version.

But if you follow in your bulletin, you're going to find, yeah, this is the same Bible we're speaking from.

But you will hear a few nuances, a few phrases that are expanded in a fashion I think that will be helpful for us for the connections we make today.

Let me pray briefly again, and then we're going to walk through this text.

And again, the theme is this What is so awesome about the grace of God that I can risk loving well the rest of my life?

What is so truly enriching about the grace of God or a relationship with Jesus that I can risk hoping in many different contexts in which I find myself now, the messes and the brokenness of life that is relationship.

Let me pray again briefly for us.

Father, thank you for this church that I have heard about for quite some time and now taste and enjoy and savor, Lord, what you are obviously doing in this community.

Thank you for the privilege I have not only to pour into Russ, but to receive from my younger brother, Lord, a growing awareness of how much more of Jesus both of us need to access and how glorious you are, O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in coming to us for greater healing, greater freedom, greater understanding of the unsearchable riches of Christ.

Come now, I pray, in these brief moments as we prepare ourselves for this feast of grace and mercy in the Lord's Supper.

Speak to us, Lord.

Show us Jesus, we pray, and it will be enough as we pray in his name.

Amen.

With this passage, I'm really gonna be primarily focusing on the first four verses of the text.

And uh and let me read again very briefly these four verses from the NIV, then we'll walk through, gonna highlight a few things that I pray will be unto great, great, great heart encouragement today.

NIV Philippians 2, 1 through 4.

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or being conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.

Each of you should look not only to your own interest, but also to the interest of others.

Well, two things should be obvious to us as we go through these four verses.

Number one, the Apostle Paul has a burden and a concern for the men and women of Philippi to relate to each other in a unique way.

I mean, this is some pretty extreme language.

Live in the body of Christ, live in your neighborhoods, live in your marriages, live as parents or as children in such a fashion that you don't think less of yourself, you just think of yourself less often.

Grow a heart that really sees your neighbor as someone not so much to be irritated by, but to be intrigued with.

Think of others more highly than yourselves.

I mean, this is some pretty radical language about a unique lifestyle that we are meant to cultivate as those who are in relationship with Jesus.

But you see, that's the operative term.

What's presupposed here is not a group of men and women like ourselves feeling really bad about how poorly we love and then just signing on to do more, try harder.

Paul is not shaming anybody in this text.

Paul is not calling out for public embarrassment.

He's not listening to the failures of men and women like us that do love poorly.

What he's doing in the first couple of verses is saying this is what is more important than anything else, is you consider yourself as a relational person.

Whether you are more like an extrovert like my wife or more like an introvert like me.

Whether you grew up in a very broken family of origin, like both my wife and I did, whoever you are, whether you grew up in Norman Rockwell's perfectly painted little house on the prairie home, and you have been always loved well, all of us need to come more fully alive to the only that love, love that is enough.

That's why Paul begins with these words.

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, well, what is he talking about there?

He's talking about the core identity for anyone that would claim to be a Christian.

He's saying here that primarily to be a Christian is not seeing Jesus as someone you follow in order to earn a relationship with God, but rather to see Jesus as someone to trust, who, in acknowledging your need, calls you into an incredible relationship with Himself.

In fact, that very first phrase, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ.

So what is the encouragement that is ours simply because we have put our faith in Jesus Christ?

Now I grew up in a church and I never heard what I'm about to tell you as someone who was both made to go to church and then actually had a season when I wanted to go to church and then who left the church so I could finally discover the gospel.

So, what is the encouragement?

If you're someone who's in Christ, let's think about out loud right now.

What would be a list that we could actually write down and ponder that's true of relationship with Christ and then its implications for how we love one another?

Well, this morning, if you are in union with Christ, all of your sins are already forgiven, past, present, and future.

Not just the 4% you're aware of, but the other 96% as well.

In fact, I should have started by asking you this question.

How many of your sins are forgiven, O Christians?

What would have been your response?

What would you probably have said?

All of them.

Of course.

What are you going to say?

37%, 67%, all those I have confessed and repented of.

Dear ones, Paul's making a radical affirmation here.

If you are in union with Christ, you are as forgiven today as you ever will be forgiven.

And that should rock our world to know that the God who made us has done something so radical for us in Jesus that right now this we hold to be true because God has affirmed it, affirmed it to be true.

We are completely forgiven, but there's so much more.

We're not only through union with Christ forgiven of all of our sins and the profound encouragement that comes from that, we're already declared to be legally righteous in Christ.

God did not give you a clean slate when you became a Christian so that you would go fill up that new clean slate with your good works.

He filled up that slate with the very righteousness of Jesus so that right now, this morning, if you are a Christian who's three nanoseconds into Christ or 50 years into Christ, right now, God has already said, I have put in your account, I put in your righteousness account all of the righteousness of Jesus.

I cannot love you more than I do today, and I will never love you less.

Now again, just ponder with me for a few moments here.

If we said nothing more than that today, if we believe nothing more than that today, then that right now the God who made you, who has every right to judge us, has been so generous as to say, I will do something on your behalf that will not just forgive you, though it will completely forgive you, but I will put you in a right relationship with me, so that right now you are truly legally considered to be already free from judgment day.

In fact, that's a part of the encouragement we have from union with Christ.

We are not afraid to die, therefore we are not afraid to live, because the most foundational relationship has been affirmed.

We've been secured in it.

And there's so much more.

Through our union with Christ, we're not just forgiven, we're not only declared legally righteous, we've been adopted into the family of God, and God now calls us his beloved daughters and sons.

We're not spiritual orphans.

We're not those that have to be tricked into thinking that any human relationships can possibly ever be enough.

And that's a part of what we were talking about in our conversation about marriage yesterday.

So many of us wrongly enter into marriage, assuming if you marry the right person, you will only be happy all the time and forever.

And when you begin to experience their brokenness and then your brokenness, if that's the agenda you're living with, assuming that you have the inalienable right to be happy all the time, you know what the Bible would call you?

A moron.

Because God's commitment is to radically reorient your heart towards the true core reality of where real encouragement is found so that we can live well when we are in relational messes or when we are indeed the healthiest of seasons of relationship.

Encouragement from union with Christ, we are forgiven.

We are declared righteous in Christ.

We have God as Abba Father, not sugar daddy.

He doesn't exist simply to give us what we think we deserve.

He is the perfect Father.

So perfect that we even in getting to know him, we begin to discover that sometime when God says no to us, it's sweeter than the yeses we might foolishly demand.

And there's so much more.

If you are in union with Christ, you have been already declared to be a co-heir with Jesus of the new heavens and new earth.

As a pastor ordained for over 40 years, I've seen a lot of families just racked at the time of death over fighting over inheritance.

Let me tell you, no human inheritance can begin to compare with the riches of knowing that if you are in Christ, your future is this resurrected, transformed, glorified universe with life and a family where every one of your relationships will be perfect.

What would happen if you and I actually believed the gospel, that gospel?

Tell you, a lot of us truly are like some of those men and women that have for years lived in North and South Dakota.

Anyone from the Dakotas here by the any chance, by any small chance?

I always ask that question.

I've never met anybody from the Dakotas.

Who is?

You are awesome.

Then you might relate to this.

Maybe this is your family story.

You know, there are people that have been raised in the Dakotas when several years ago seismologists come in and say, excuse me, I would like to start paying you$300,000 a year just to rent your property because you've got natural gas reserves on your property.

Oh, it's still yours.

I just want to lease your property so we can tap into the gas.

And that might be a family that just had a mom and pop store, you know, selling Wrigley's chewing gum and a little gas and a few uh grit newspapers just to get by, and did not realize that legally was theirs all along, all the unsearchable riches of resources below the surface.

Too much of the time, that's how we live as Christians.

We just don't know whose we are and what we have simply because God has hidden our lives in Jesus.

Again, really, we could stop there and pray and ask God's Spirit just to say, Lord, make that much of this text real, and it would be an awesome day.

It would be an awesome rest of 2018.

It'd be an awesome rest of the next decade.

But there is more.

Let's just consider a little bit more what this text is saying.

If you have any encouragement, I mean you in union with Christ.

If any comfort from his love, even hold on to this idea here, you see, the very fact that God says encouragement and comfort, he says to us, these are good things to want.

You're not want, you're not wrong to want encouragement.

You're not wrong to want comfort.

But notice what's being underscored here.

If you have any comfort from the love of Jesus, which presupposes we should be increasingly coming alive to the comforting love of Jesus.

So, what are some of the ways the love of Jesus comforts us?

Well, even based upon what we just said a moment ago, the comfort of really knowing God has made his peace with us.

See, a lot of times we wrongly turn the equation around and we talk about making our peace with God.

I grew up on old John Wayne cowboy movies, and invariably you would see this scene with someone with their six shooter saying, Make your peace with God, son.

And it's such a foolish notion to think that any one of us can make our peace with God.

That's not the issue in life.

The issue is, is God at peace with me?

And if we know the gospel of God's grace, there's no doubt we're not living life holding a daisy.

He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.

We know this with certainty because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, because God, by his sovereign goodness, has hidden our lives in Jesus.

He loves us right now.

God the Father loves us as much as He loves Jesus, and there's nothing we can do about it but come alive to it.

We cannot add to it, we cannot take away from it.

The scriptures are saying as we grow in this awareness of God's love, we do begin to relate to different people in different ways.

We begin to say, God, as you love me, so let me love in this broken family system that happens to be mine.

As you love me, not as I desire to be loved, not as I demand people to love me, but as you truly love me in Christ Father.

Help me to be the best neighbor on my street, entering into the pain and the stories of people that I share neighborhood with.

Lord, help me to be truly at work, less using people to bump my place up in the org chart.

Help me to know you have written me into the culture of that company to love well and to offer a non-anxious presence because, Lord, truly you are who really matters.

How else does the love of God comfort us?

Shared yesterday that a part of my story is I had a burnout at age 50 that really began to expose to me heart wounds I had been carrying that really caused me in my marriage or made it easy for me in my marriage to live with such a disconnected heart from my wife and my kids.

And the comforting love of Jesus takes us into those parts of our story where there's a need for healing.

It is so awesome to know that because this gospel is true, posing and pretending go out the window.

In fact, the one place where we should have to pose and pretend less is right here as the people of God receiving God's word to us, receiving the sacrament of his grace and mercy, which we will in just a few minutes.

Did not understand the impact of the death of my mom in my life.

As an 11-year-old kid, to have her ripped out of my life.

A few years later, the only girl I dated through high school also was killed in a car wreck.

And then to move into the season of this comforting love of God that would give me the, in time, the power to begin to look at a narrative of sexual abuse that had marked and marred me more than I had any way of understanding.

Does the love of Jesus comfort us?

Absolutely, with the assurance of heaven, but also with the presence of his healing, compassion, and kindness.

And we could go on and on and on today.

See, these are just big rhetorical questions Paul's asking.

Do you have any encouragement communion with Christ?

Do you have comfort from his love?

Do you have fellowship with the Spirit?

Fellowship is simply another word, the word koinonia, it's for the picture of intimacy and connection.

Are you connected with God by his spirit so that relationship with God is not theory, it's reality.

Is your theology becoming doxology?

Paul's basically saying.

Talked to one dear sister this morning before the service.

She said, Scotty, I knew God's grace, but then I forgot it.

A even forgot the very lyrics of grace.

But then I began to hear the lyric of the gospel, and then I discovered its music again.

See, that's what we're doing right now.

We're hearing the lyric of God's grace, but we want to go on to hear its music that gets wrapped within our hearts so that we can begin to say, as a single, as a son, as a daughter, as a coworker, as a neighbor, as a friend, as a child, this grace is the most defining, reorienting power on the face of the earth.

Lord, meet me now.

That's the most important thing about your next season of life.

Not what are you gonna do with your marriage or your parenting or your friendships?

It's gonna be, will you risk believing that God loves you this much?

Because this is not just a game changer, this is an everything changer.

If you have any tenderness and compassion.

See, Paul's presupposing these are things that you want, but if you end up demanding them from the wrong, then you will not only make yourself miserable, but everybody that lives around you.

Where are you going for tenderness and compassion?

Some of we men escape to it in pornography because only in pornography can we have the illusion of connection and intimacy without the risk of relationship.

And you see, that's why scriptures talk so much about idolatry and broken cisterns that hold no water and false loves that we run after.

Dear, dear, dear, dear friends, there is only one love better than life.

There is only one love that is enough to release the longings, the good longings that God has given you.

There's only one love enough.

To take on the burden of how you have been such a failure in loving well.

And that's the good news of this gospel that we proclaim today.

It's why Paul will move forward now in that very text as you heard it read, saying to us, as you see and believe these riches of grace, then begin to think of yourself not simply as a survivor, but someone called to thrive wherever you are.

In fact, the love where he goes next.

If we were to read further into Philippians 2, Paul will say to the church, shine as stars in the universe.

Now that's not shine as rock stars.

It means this, the best gift that Christ the Redeemer, Church of Marietta, will ever give, this neighborhood and the surrounding area will not be your perfection, but your weakness and your brokenness.

It will be you guys living out as broken vessels, offering the aroma of grace, the smell of grace to people that just assume we Christians do nothing but get in rooms like this to talk about the outsiders.

Can you imagine what a gospel renewal would look like in this church where we are free to repent, free to own our brokenness, free to own the wonders of God's love, becoming more childlike even as we come less child-ish.

I just want to pray for you that that's gonna be absolutely the season the Father takes you into.

Take a few minutes now.

I'm gonna pray for us together, pray these words into our hearts, and then Russ is gonna come and bring us to the throne of grace, this table of grace.

Let me pray for us.

Father, thank you so much that Russ asked me to speak about these very issues, Lord, because uh I am, along with many in this room, Cinderella with amnesia.

Lord, I forget.

Even as Martin Luther said, we need to hear the gospel every day because we forget it every day.

And Lord, when we forget, there is primary encouragement through union with Christ.

When we forget, Lord, the comfort of your lavish love for us, when we forget that fellowship with the Spirit speaks of the incredible intimacy of Eden for which we have been made, but also the first fruits of life in your kingdom in its fullness, that is surely our future.

Lord, when we forget we are miserable and we are misery makers.

I pray for, Lord, maybe some friends here today that know they do not know Jesus yet.

That, Lord, this would be the beginning of the stirring of hope to hear something different, to hear that the gospel is not doom or try harder.

It's trust in the one who's done everything for us.

Lord, come in power, come in kindness, renew our hearts.

Just again, just like my sister, Lord, sharing that sweet fellowship this morning.

Lord, restore to us the joy of your salvation for us.

Stir within us, Lord, a calling that there is only one love, and it is freely ours in Jesus.

Lord, thank you now for the remainder of the service.

Free us to feast, free us to encourage one another.

Free us, Lord, to trust you that you do love us as much as you say that you do.

In Jesus' name and for his glory, we do pray.

Amen.